Tag Archives: Charles Murray

Bill Kristol is the neo-conservative, i.e., warmonger for Israel, and the founder and editor at large of the political magazine The Weekly Standard.Kristol was hostile to Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy from the start, and would rather that Hillary Clinton be elected president. See:

They do know, but they just don’t care.

Last Tuesday night, February 7, 2017, Bill Kristolfinally stripped away whatever deceptive mask he still wore when he called white working Americans “decadent, lazy and spoiled,” and applauded their replacement by immigrants.
The occasion was the American Enterprise Institute’s “It Came Apart: What’s Next for a Fractured Culture” — a panel discussion on how Donald Trump’s rise relates to the white working class’s record low levels of labor-force participation, religiosity, and family formation, which panel participant Dr. Charles Murray had described in his 2012 book Coming Apart: The State of White America.
At one point in the discussion, Dr. Murray observed that the 2016 election revealed “a very strong disaffection by the white working class toward the new upper class, fueled in substantial part by the open contempt and disdain that the new upper class has for the working class and especially for the white working class.” That is why although Murray had never warmed to Donald Trump, the election did lead him to favor a restrictionist policy on low-skilled immigration — that people with low skills should be restricted from immigrating to the United States.
To that, Bill Kristol replied that he’d “actually sort of gone the opposite way on immigration,” meaning he favors unrestricted immigration for the low-skilled. Admitting that he is telling a truth about himself which he expects will make him a pariah, Kristol said:

“Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don’t you want to get new Americans in? Seriously, you can make the case—this is going on too long and this is too crazy, probably, and I hope this thing isn’t being videotaped or ever shown anywhere [because] whatever tiny, pathetic future I have is going to totally collapse.“

After some awkward laughter from the audience, Kristol continued:

“You can make a case that America has been great because every—I think John Adams said this—basically if you’re a free society, a capitalist society, after two or three generations of hard work everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled—whatever. Then, luckily, you have these waves of people coming in from Italy, Ireland, Russia, and now Mexico, who really want to work hard and really want to succeed and really want their kids to live better lives than them and aren’t sort of clipping coupons or hoping that they can hang on and meanwhile grew up as spoiled kids and so forth. In that respect, I don’t know how this moment is that different from the early 20th century.”

You can see and hear Kristol for yourself in this extended video of the American Enterprise Institute event. The video is set to begin at the 54:15 mark when Kristol began his controversial remarks:

In contrast, Dr. Murray was sympathetic to the white working class.
As Henry Wolff of American Renaissance points out, Murray reminded the panel that since immigrants concentrate in working-class areas, working-class Americans “bore the brunt of that kind of unasked-for ethnic heterogeneity,” while America’s elites “live in neighborhoods that are exactly the way they want them to be.” This disparity was the source of a “great deal of the anger” in the 2016 election. That is why, unlike Bill Kristol, Charles Murray supports limiting low-skilled immigration because:

“We as Americans owe an obligation to our fellow Americans . . . that should take priority over our obligation to the world’s population and globalization.”

UPDATE (Feb. 11, 2017):

Bill Kristol applauds the replacement of America’s white working class with immigrants because the latter are hardworking whereas the former have grown “decadent, lazy, and spoiled”. Here’s a graph from LaborEcon that shows more non-U.S. citizens receive welfare (cash, food stamps, Medicaid) than citizens.
And so, Bill Kristol, not only are you an anti-white racist and an elitist who disdains the working class, you are also just plain WRONG about immigrants being harder workers than the “decadent, lazy and spoiled” white working class.~Eowyn

How thick is your bubble?

Notable author Charles Murray has a new book out, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.
In the book, Murray saysthere’s an unprecedented and troubling cultural separation in Amerca — between not just rich and poor but between upper-middle class and working class. Americans are living separate lives, defined by increasingly distinct core values and practices.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=VudgEiVUn-E]
To promote the book, his publisher AEI has put together an interesting and amusing quiz to measure “How thick is your bubble?”— that is, how insulated you are from how most Americans live.Take the quiz!Click here.

“On a scale from 0 to 20 points, where 20 signifies full engagement with mainstream American culture and 0 signifies deep cultural isolation within the new upper class bubble, you scored between 13 and 16. In other words, you don’t even have a bubble.“

I think my “12” score has something to do with the fact that, despite my Ph.D. degree and full professorship, I’m an immigrant (legal) who grew up in poverty and worked my way through my first 4 years of college with menial jobs that included dishwasher, graveyard-shift waitress, shoe-salesgirl, A&W fast food worker, deep-frying artichokes, and selling Fullerbrush and Avon door to door.
I have a feeling effete Liberals or Progressives will score lower on this Bubble Quiz than Conservatives. It’d be interesting to see how Fellowship of the Minds’ readers do on this quiz.
National Review’s David French scored “17” on the quiz. I support his endorsement of Charles Murray’s call for successful Americans to leave the bubble and to consciously engage across the entire spectrum of American society.
To take the Bubble Quiz, click here!!!
H/t Bob Russell. 🙂

Update (Feb 8, 2012):

Charles Murray, author of the bubble book, explains there’s a “new upper class” in America who increasingly are different and insulated from larger America, which is why we don’t them. Go here.~Eowyn

With Father’s Day tomorrow, we should ponder the sad plight of the 20 million American children who are growing up without their fathers in the home. In 1993 Charles Murray identified “illegitimacy as the single most important social problem of our time . . . because it drives everything else.”

Murray was whistling in the wind. Last year, the U.S. illegitimacy rate had grown to 41 percent, and among whites it was 29 percent.

Prior to Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, husbands and fathers provided for their families. The 1.7 million out-of-wedlock babies born last year and their unmarried moms now look to Big Brother as their financial provider.

The left is content to let this problem persist because 70 percent of unmarried women voted for Barack Obama for president. They vote for the party that offers the richer subsidies.

Means-tested welfare handouts cost federal taxpayers $700 billion last year (not counting programs into which people pay, such as Social Security and Medicare). Spending by the states raises the annual total to nearly $900 billion, more than we are spending on national defense, and most of these programs subsidize non-marriage.

The 77 means-tested programs include Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), food stamps, housing subsidies, Medicaid, daycare, WIC, EITC (which can be as much as $5,657 a year to low-income families), School Lunch, School Breakfast, Summer Food, SSI, Headstart, and S-CHIP. The Heritage Foundation estimates that these benefits amount to $16,800 per person in poverty.

Ronald Reagan’s advice is still on target. If we subsidize something, we’ll get more of it; if we tax it, we’ll get less.

The financial subsidies that encourage non-marriage are the biggest reason why federal spending is out of control. There is no way to make significant cuts in the federal deficit unless we address the marriage-absence problem.

Poverty is massively greater for children living with a single, divorced, or cohabiting parent than with parents who are married to each other. The poverty rate for single parents with children is 37 percent, but only 6 percent for married couples with children.

Marriage breakdown is a double-edged sword. At the same time that it forces government to become the financial provider for millions of children and their caregivers, it also reduces the government’s tax receipts to pay for the handouts.

Income tax day now divides us into two almost equal classes: those who pay for government services and freeloaders. In 2009, 47 percent paid no federal income taxes, and the bottom 40 percent receive cash or benefits financed by the 53 percent who do pay income taxes.

Among other unfortunate effects, the trends toward non-marriage and toward same-sex marriage are a direct attack on fathers. The bond between a child and his mother is an obvious fact of nature, but marriage is the relationship that establishes the link between a child and his father.

There are many causes for the dramatic reduction in marriage, starting with unilateral divorce, which spread across the United States in the 1960s and ’70s, putting government on the side of marriage breakup. Then came the legalizing of abortion, diminishing the custom of shotgun marriages, which in earlier years was often the response to surprise pregnancies.

The feminist notion that women should be independent of men, followed by affirmative-action/female quotas in employment, tended to carry out the goal stated by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that the concept of husband-breadwinner and wife-homemaker “must be eliminated.” These feminist ideas and practices demean marriage by discriminating against men and also against fulltime homemakers.

Since the federal government created the child-support bureaucracy, the majority of divorces have been initiated by women. They confidently expect that pro-feminist family courts will award them a steady income for which they will never be held accountable.

The more child support that divorced fathers are ordered to pay, the more federal funds flow through the hands of the states, which compete for federal bonuses given to states that collect the most child support. It is profitable to state bureaucrats to make sure that fathers are permitted to see their own children only a few days per month so support payments can be set at the highest possible level.

Women have discovered they can use a request for an Order of Protection against their husband as “the gamesmanship of divorce” (in the words of the Illinois Bar Journal) in order to get sole child custody plus generous so-called child support. It’s easy to get such Orders without any evidence of abuse or even a threat, without notice to the husband, and with no danger of prosecution for perjury.

Federal and state laws and subsidies that undermine marriage are the biggest fiscal as well as cultural issue of our times.